Tourism from below: An approach for the realisation of community life projects

This investigation explores the experiences of the different actors involved in tourism for development (T4D) initiatives implemented in three indigenous and rural communities located on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico's most touristed region. While T4D is promoted as a catalyst for the sustainable development of marginalised communities, many T4D initiatives fail to engage communities and have a short lifespan. However, the communities studied, developed community-based tourism (CBT) ventures that have been operational for over a decade, and their stories contribute to the critique of T4D and CBT scholarship from a grassroots perspective. I draw on the theoretical frameworks of Sustainable Livelihood Strategies and Latin American debates on the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) to perform this analysis. These theoretical lenses facilitated the re-signification of tourism through the eyes of tourism-embracing communities. Interviews with the actors involved in T4D in these communities, participant observation, and participatory network diagrams of economic interactions, enabled understanding of the perspectives and meaning placed on tourism by the host communities. The conflicting viewpoints of the various actors involved in T4D, combined with the application of the sustainable livelihood framework, facilitated identifying failures in T4D initiatives, currently unrecognised in the literature, that prevent tourism from generating development as communities envision it. Furthermore, applying the SSE to the analysis of the empirical data, revealed tourism gains that the present T4D literature overlooks, as these gains are non-monetizable but empower communities to fulfil their life projects. This also contributes to the SSE literature as it demonstrates tourism's potential to develop the SSE, a sector that this literature overlooks due to its neoliberal character. The findings presented in this investigation demonstrate the need to redesign T4D so that, rather than focusing on the sustainability of tourism, it concentrates on the sustainability of livelihoods and community objectives.